Monstrous failures in english at the hsc level

Bangladesh is one of the developing countries of the third world and the people of Bangladesh are, as delegates and observers from different countries remark with an air of satisfaction, progressing quite rapidly. But the picture of the total education system is really unsatisfactory and regrettable when we find that the education sector, despite the hearty and active endeavour of the government to boost up and gear up the students of our country to rank among the world-class students, is retreating fast for some reason or other. It has been found that the failure and weakness of the students in English exceed all other failures and weaknesses. To understand the standard of English of the students, some specimen English sentences are given below.

"He go to school." "Their is many student in the school" "I goes to market." "The horse cans run first." The boys swimming in the pond." "Are you see him yesterday?" "What you eat in morning?" Hence the serious need for investigation into the matter.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

There are five international languages in the world and English has gained the topmost priority and status among them. English is now being used and treated as the first language in many countries because of its wide acceptability. In Bangladesh too, English has been given utmost priority and importance for practical reasons. The Bangladesh government has made English compulsory at all levels of education, beginning from class one to masters, including engineering, medicine, and agriculture.

But the main factor that should be held responsible for the students' weakness and failure in English is the lack of proper guidance of the teachers, who are supposed to be well versed and have good command over the English language. But unfortunately, most of them are seen to possess very poor knowledge of English and are betraying their ignorance in class performance. They are mostly inexperienced, unskilled, untrained and lacking proper knowledge in English. There are many teachers in Bangladesh teaching English in primary, secondary and higher secondary levels who are unable to write a sentence in English in grammatically acceptable form. Moreover, their pronunciation is so poor and distorted that the students who learn English from these teachers can never acquire the ability to speak a single word or sentence in front of an audience. The teachers teach the students English in a way that is not the method of teaching English at all.

Not only that. The environment necessary for teaching and learning English is totally absent in the schools and colleges of Bangladesh. The faulty method of teaching English is largely responsible for the poor performance of the students. We know, there are four skills of teaching and learning a language -- listening, speaking, reading and writing. In order to write English correctly a student will have to learn the grammatical rules at the secondary level along with the above four skills. But at present, NCTB has introduced communicative method for teaching and learning English at the secondary and higher secondary levels. This communicative method is not as effective as the traditional method, as is obvious from the fact that a student who has passed the HSC exam cannot write or speak a sentence correctly.

On the contrary, a student who has passed the HSC exam in the traditional method can write English better. Its main cause is that in communicative method the teacher only helps the students understand the texts and know the meanings of the difficult and unknown words. After doing this, the teacher asks the students to answer the different forms of questions on the passage. Hence, very naturally, the learners learn only how to pick up the right word from the passage to answer the questions. The process requires the students to use only one word in most cases. This one-word exercise and practice cannot enable a student to write correct English or communicate with other people properly, which is the main target of the present education system. It is thus seen that a student who knows nothing of English language and grammar gets good marks, at least pass marks, in the exam. It is because s/he could take help from his/her friend in the exam hall. Thus, after passing the HSC exam, when he enters into university and other institutions for higher education, he cannot secure even pass marks. This is really disgraceful.

The skills of teaching English, in the first place, are not being properly applied at present, though the syllabus of the higher secondary level is designed on the basis of the four skills. What I have said about the communicative methodology can be understood more clearly from the specimens of the question patterns of the HSC exam.

Passage (seen & unseen)

Q.1. True/false

2. MCQ

3. Filling in the gaps with clues.

4. Information transfer.

5. Open ended questions.

6. Filling in the gaps without clues.

7. Summarizing.

8. Flow chart.

9. Cloze test with clues.

10. Cloze test without clues.

11. Producing sentences from a substitution table.

12. Reordering sentences.

13. Paragraph writing.

The HSC students are very rarely inspired to learn words or increase their vocabulary. Though they are sometimes told to learn the meaning of the unknown words, they are not taught the use, usage and derivatives of the words. As a result, they cannot properly apply or use those learned words in the right context.

The second cause is the lack of suitable class environment, that is, in the classroom the teachers don't encourage the students to talk English. "Practice makes a man perfect," goes the saying. Practice has no alternative. Therefore, lack of practice leads the students ultimately to fear and hesitation which they cannot overcome even in the later part of their life.

Thirdly, the students are encouraged to memorize some selected and suggested compositions for passing the exams. The most shocking matter is that, when the students, who memorize compositions, do not find common topic for writing composition in the exam question, they get upset and nervous, and as such cut a sorry figure in the exam frustrating everybody.

-Now I would like to suggest some effective ways of English at the HSC level.

-English grammar (parts of speech, articles, tense, voice, narration, sequence of tense, clause, formation of sentence, sub-verb agreement, different parts of a sentence, use of prepositions, phrases and idioms, basic sentence patterns etc.

-The derivatives of words.

-Encouraging the students to write compositions in the classrooms and identifying and correcting their mistakes.

-Encouraging learning words from Eng-Eng dictionary with examples and illustrations.

Some items that are not effective for learning English should be removed from the HSC English syllabus. I have just given a hint of the thing. A detailed analysis is not possible within the space of this article.

English is a foreign language to us. Hence in order to learn English effectively the English syllabus should be reshuffled once again. In the present day world, communication is the main theme. So, to reach our goal and fulfil the purpose of communication, we have to teach English in the schools and colleges following the most effective method of teaching a foreign language. When a child is born, it hears and learns the words that are spoken by its mother and the people surrounding it. A good plan should be made and a good amount of time should be spent to create a suitable environment for teaching English.

To sum up, I would like to say that the persons concerned with teaching English should make a concerted effort to pave the way for bringing about the students' success in English. We are a poor nation, and, if we are to make our rightful position in the modern world, we have to make double pace engaging all of our resources and merits. Since English is the most important and widely used of all the international languages, advancement in the use of English of our people might well be one potent way of increasing our pace of development so as to ensure our prestigious position among the developing countries.

M Mahbub Murshed is a Teacher of English at Bangladesh International School, Jeddah.